When in 2020, Elvis Presley’s grandson Ben took his own life at the family’s home in California, his mother Lisa Marie processed her grief as perhaps only a member of the Presley clan could do.
She kept the 27-year-old’s body at her home for two months, lying on dry ice, with the bedroom temperature maintained at 13c (55f).
Ben, like pretty much everyone else in his family, had struggled with drink and drugs. His fate had morbid echoes of how, 43 years earlier, his grandfather’s body had been laid out so thousands of fans could file past his open coffin.
‘It was really important for my mum to have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad,’ says Lisa Marie’s actress daughter, Riley Keough.
In a new memoir by Lisa Marie, which Riley completed after her mother died aged 54 in January last year, the only child of Elvis and wife Priscilla explains how California law didn’t require the dead to be buried immediately.
Benjamin Keogh took his own life at his family’s home in California in 2020. Pictured is one of his mother’s Lisa Marie Presley’s Instagram posts dedicated to him
Lisa Marie Presley and her son Benjamin Presley Keough at ‘The Elvis Experience’ in 2015
American rock legend Elvis Presley pictured with his daughter Lisa Marie Presley
‘I found a very empathetic funeral home owner. I told her that having my dad in the house after he died was incredibly helpful because I could go and spend time with him and talk with him,’ writes Lisa Marie.
Eccentric behaviour runs deep in the Presley family but Lisa Marie at least understands that ‘I think it would scare the [hell] out of anybody else to have their son there like that’, adding: ‘But not me.’
In fact, she wasn’t yet done as she decided that she and Riley – Ben’s sister – should get tattoos of his name that matched ones of their names that Ben had on his collarbone and hand.
That, however, meant a tattooist had to see Ben’s body so he could copy precisely the font and positioning.
Riley watched as Lisa Marie lifted the coffin lid and ‘in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable’ proceeded to hold up Ben’s hand and show it to the tattooist.
‘Soon after that, we all kind of got this vibe from my brother that he didn’t want his body in this house any more,’ says Riley. ‘ ‘Guys,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘this is getting weird.’ ‘
As revealed in the new memoir, From Here To The Great Unknown, it had got ‘weird’ long ago.
Allowed to run wild as a child at a Graceland heaving with guns, drugs and mayhem, Lisa Marie watched her father die from a drug-related heart attack when she was nine.
Aged ten, she was allegedly abused by one of her mother’s boyfriends and by 14 she was abusing drugs and had lost her virginity to a 23-year-old actor who sold photos of them together.
Marrying someone normal might have provided a way out of the crazy Presley world, but instead, Lisa Marie went on to wed Michael Jackson followed by Nicolas Cage, two of the most outlandish stars in Tinseltown.
Lisa Marie Presley died on January 12, 2023, aged 54, of a small bowel obstruction
Lisa Marie Presley (right) pictured with her actress daughter Riley Keogh
By Lisa Marie Presley’s standards, putting her dead son on dry ice for weeks was perhaps simply par for the course.
‘Troubled’ doesn’t begin to describe the woman. Born in 1968, the year her father had a career comeback, Lisa Marie admits he was ‘like a god to me’ – even though, unlike his devoted fans, she saw the dark side of the man.
At Graceland, where she slept in a black-and-white fur bed so big it needed steps up to it, everyone walked on eggshells for fear of incurring his ferocious wrath.
Lisa Marie’s ‘chilly’ and painfully insecure mother, Priscilla, whose parents allowed her to start a relationship with Elvis when she was just 14, told her daughter that she was so terrified of putting on weight and losing Presley to another woman when she got pregnant that she’d considered falling off her horse to cause a miscarriage.
‘I always felt she didn’t want me,’ says Lisa Marie.
She became a daddy’s girl and Elvis presided over her childhood of super-entitled anarchy.
Lisa Marie became a daddy’s girl and Elvis presided over her childhood of super-entitled anarchy
Rock and roll singer Elvis Presley with his wife Priscilla Beaulieu Presley and their four-day-old daughter Lisa Marie Presley
Lisa Marie Presley and her mother Priscilla Presley at the ‘Elvis’ experience at Las Vegas Resort
At Graceland, where she spent her summers after her parents split when she was four, Elvis let the First Princess of Rock ‘n’ Roll run amok.
She rode her pony inside the house, smashed up his fleet of golf carts in demolition derbies with her friends and threatened Presley’s large staff and entourage with the sack if they didn’t indulge her every whim.
It hardly helped that the nocturnal, drug-addled Elvis was a spoilt child, too.
His explosive screaming fits –often because he’d run out of one or other of the prescription pills to which he was addicted – were so bad that everyone around him had to take cover as he hurled anything he could find off balconies.
‘You could always sense my dad’s intensity. If it was a good intensity, it was incredible,’ she said. ‘If it was bad, watch the f*** out.’
He rarely went anywhere without a holstered pistol strapped to his hip, even when he took Lisa Marie on a rollercoaster ride at a local amusement park he would sometimes take over for their exclusive use.
About a week after that rollercoaster ride, a nine-year-old Lisa Marie watched Elvis die, running into his vast bathroom to find him lying on the floor as medics tried to revive him.
‘They were standing over him, moving him around, trying to work on him. I was screaming bloody murder,’ she says.
And she never got over the ‘free-for-all’ that ensued as his family and other hangers-on systematically looted Graceland.
‘Everybody went to town. Everything was swiped – jewellery, artefacts, personal items – before he was even pronounced dead.’
Austin Butler, who played Elvis in the 2022 biopic, and Lisa Marie Presley at Elvis Presley’s 88th birthday celebration
Elvis Presley pictured with his wife Priscilla Presley and father Vernon Presley circa 1970
Scientology helped fill the gulf in her life. Scientologist John Travolta recruited both Priscilla and Lisa Marie to the controversial ‘church’ when the latter was only ten.
Priscilla was often away during her daughter’s early years, acting or modelling or holidaying with the latest man in her life, leaving Lisa Marie with a battalion of nannies and chefs – and their church. ‘Scientology kind of raised me for her,’ she recalls.
In the memoir, Lisa Marie alleges Michael Edwards, an actor and model who was her mother’s boyfriend for seven years, first introduced her to sex. She claims Edwards had a ‘horrible temper’ and first molested her when she was a young girl.
She says she ‘woke up to find him on his knees next to my bed, running his finger up my leg under the sheets, and if I moved, he stopped – so I moved.’
Edwards reportedly explained that he was ‘going to teach me what was going to happen when I get older’.
She claims the abuse continued for several years.
Elvis Presley being fed a mouthful of wedding cake by his bride Priscilla Beaulieu at the Aladdin Hotel, Las Vegas. 1967
Actress Riley Keough and her mother Lisa Marie Presley attend the after party for the premiere of Apparition’s ‘The Runaways’
Lisa Marie Presley as a baby being held by her mother Priscilla Presley and Elvis Presley
Edwards has since dismissed the allegation as a ‘fabrication’, saying: ‘These claims are absolutely untrue. I never molested Lisa Marie and am shocked at the suggestion that I did.’
An over-indulged little girl became a nightmare adolescent who got ‘heavily’ into drugs –mainly cannabis and cocaine – and was passed in despair from school to school.
Lisa Marie says she lost her virginity when she was 14 to a 23-year-old actor who’d made a film with Priscilla.
This, her first relationship, lasted over two years, ending when the actor boyfriend had a friend secretly take photos of them together in a park and sold them to the media.
Mother and daughter, the book claims, got their revenge by shopping the man, who was dealing drugs, to the police.
When her ‘strict’ mother couldn’t have her at home any longer and packed her off to live at LA’s Scientology Celebrity Centre, Lisa Marie promptly invited over her cocaine dealer and some friends and they had a drug-fuelled ‘four-day bender’ in her bedroom.
Lisa Marie married musician Danny Keough when she was 20 after – says Riley – ‘chasing’ him for two years. They had two children, Riley and Ben, and he seems like a kind and decent man.
That probably spelled his doom with Lisa Marie. After six years she left him and – 20 days after the 1994 divorce came through – she married Michael Jackson, whom she’d started seeing while still married to Keough.
At the time, the first child molestation accusations against him were being made. Was his interest in marrying a coincidence?
‘I just thought he was sad and lonely,’ Lisa Marie recalls.
Priscilla Presley and Elvis Presley pictured with their young daughter Lisa Marie Presley in 1970
Finley Lockwood, Lisa Marie Presley, Priscilla Presley, Riley Keough and Harper Lockwood – three generations of Preselys
So sad and lonely, it transpired, that – although in his mid-30s – he told her he was still a virgin.
‘I think he had kissed Tatum O’Neal, and he’d had a thing with Brooke Shields, which hadn’t been physical apart from a kiss. He said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once too, but nothing happened.’
On the night in Las Vegas when he told her she had to leave Keough and marry him so they could have children, he was so self-conscious he first had to turn the lights off so she couldn’t see him.
‘When he decided to first kiss me, he just did it. He was instigating everything,’ she says. ‘The physical stuff started happening. I had thought that maybe we wouldn’t do anything until we got married, but he said: “I’m not waiting!”‘
She fell in love with him, she says, ‘because he was normal, just f*****g normal’.
The newlyweds did such ‘normal’ things as take the children to school with a chimpanzee (not his famous companion Bubbles) in the car and, whenever they went out, hide Riley and Ben behind sunglasses and hats.
Lisa Marie insists she never saw any evidence Jackson was a paedophile but, even so, refused to have children with him. That reluctance, and Jackson’s growing secrecy and drug use, led to them ending the marriage after two years in 1996.
Riley Keough and her mother Lisa Marie Presley at Elle Women in Hollywood
Priscilla Presley, Lisa Marie Presley, Riley Keough at the ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ film premiere
More marital lunacy was to follow in 2002 with Elvis obsessive Nicolas Cage. It lasted just 108 days – the shortest of all four of her unions.
At 40, following the birth of twins by Caesarean section with fourth husband Michael Lockwood – and the family’s move to England where they lived near a Scientology HQ in East Sussex – she became addicted to painkillers, swallowing 80 pills a day.
She finally left the Scientologists in 2014. Just as she appeared to be getting herself together, her son Ben took his own life.
‘I knew my mum wouldn’t survive it for long,’ says Riley. ‘We all knew my mum was going to die of a broken heart.’